I’ve raised the issue of celebrity humanitarianism several times on this blog (here, here, and here). It is a fraught territory that generally raises strong feelings among the development community. Done wrong, it can be disastrous. Done well…well, honestly, there is a debate about whether or not it can be done well.

I had the opportunity to move beyond the blog and spend some time in academic thought on this topic – birthed from Twitter, no less! When some colleagues approached me about writing a chapter about Bono and celebrity humanitarianism for a book they were putting together, I really wanted to take up the offer but lacked the time necessary to really write a good chapter. So I put out a call for co-authors on Twitter, and Ami Shah took me up on it. She roped a colleague, historian Bruce Hall, into the project, which proved to be a boon to us. The product, “Bono, Band Aid, and Before: Celebrity Humanitarianism, Music and the Objects of its Action” was a really interesting chapter (I learned things from my co-authors in writing it) on the history of celebrity humanitarianism, and how the “new” celebrity wonkery of Bono and others is, in fact, nothing new at all.

The chapter will appear in 2014 in the book Soundscapes of Wellbeing in Popular Music. (Andrews, Gavin J., Paul Kingsbury, and Robin A. Kearns, eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate). I have posted a preprint version of our chapter on my preprints page (link here). If you are into this topic, I think you will find it an interesting read…